Date   : Fri, 09 Oct 2009 22:20:51 +0100
From   : zeem.uk@... (Alex Taylor)
Subject: Electric Dreams last night.

2009/10/8 Rick Murray <rick@...>:

>If I want to PRINT
> (or whatever), why can't I just type in the keyword? God, even the Oric
> managed to parse BASIC, what's Sinclair's excuse?

Very simple. It was a carry-over from the flat, touch-sensitive
membrane keyboards of the ZX80 and '81, where it was devised as a
method to speed up entering programs.

They had flat membrane keyboards because they were extremely cheap to
make, and the idea was to make the cheapest possible functional
computer. Full moving keyboards were expensive, and even an Oric-style
calculator keyboard would have added to the cost.

The Spectrum got actual moving keys (albeit the infamous 'dead flesh'
rubber, in fact so did later ZX81s with a stick-on rubber keyboard),
but they obviously took the decision that the keyboard still wasn't
quite good enough for entering all the keywords in full.

Fiddling with someone else's machine for 10 minutes here and there
might prove frustrating while looking for the keywords, but anybody
who spent any time at all with it, such as those with their own
machine, would have learned where they all were fairly quickly.

The 128K Spectrums (developed initially by a Spanish company who built
machines under licence) had a massively better keyboard, initially the
same as that of the 48K Plus and improved further with the
Amstrad-built machines, so they got the ability to use
single-character entry in the 128K BASIC editor.

-- 
Alex Taylor